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Automotive News Blog at CARandDRIVER.com - Car News ResourceTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:22:44 +0000minutely5http://wordpress.org/?v=4.043704024 Hours of LeMons: The History of the LeMons Supreme Court’s BRIBED Stencilhttp://blog.caranddriver.com/24-hours-of-lemons-the-history-of-the-lemons-supreme-courts-bribed-stencil/
http://blog.caranddriver.com/?p=73045http://blog.caranddriver.com/24-hours-of-lemons-the-history-of-the-lemons-supreme-courts-bribed-stencil/#commentsThu, 20 Oct 2011 16:00:20 +0000Murilee MartinEver since Judge Jonny and I discovered that extorting accepting bribes from LeMons racers put the kibosh on whining about “unfairness,” we’ve been using special stencils to mark the teams that show respect to the LeMons Supreme Court.-

It’s pretty simple: your team slips a jug of booze, cash, some high-fat snacks, or other judge-pleasing goodie to the Court, we let the other racers know that you’ve bought your way into our good graces.

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The very first BRIBED stencil was broken out at the first-ever LeMons South event, back in the fall of 2008. It was cut out of cereal-box cardboard and showed the scales of justice being tilted by a dollar sign. This stencil lasted until early 2009, at which point the buildup of spraypaint got so thick that the stencil started to break (LeMons stencils are subjected to some pretty rough handling; they get stepped on constantly during the BS Inspection, and they get stuffed into plastic bins full of penalty props at the end of each race). When we retired BRIBED Stencil #1, we hung it up in the LeMons Museum (aka the wall behind Jeff Glenn’s desk at LeMons HQ in Emeryville).

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I made Bribed Stencil #2 using the same pattern, so those of you with the dollar-sign BRIBED stencil on your car probably can’t prove whether you’ve got a #1 or a #2. This stencil made it deep into 2009 before getting retired. Painted over your stencils? That might make it harder to prove your car’s provenance at the 2019 Barrett-Jackson auction!

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Since most of our bribes turned out to be booze, I replaced the dollar sign with a South Carolina-style moonshine jug when I made BRIBED Stencil #3.

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This design looked pretty good, but #3 was worn out by the end of the 2009 season.

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At the beginning of the 2010 LeMons season, I made BRIBED Stencil #4. This is identical to #3, except for the drops of booze flying out of the bottle’s neck.

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At the Cain’t Git Bayou race in May of 2010, we failed to pack BRIBED Stencil #4, so I had to make a Field Expedient BRIBED Stencil with a Coke box and a carpet knife. BRIBED Stencil #5, which reads “BAKSHEESH PAID” with a dollar sign, is one of the rarest of all the LeMons Supreme Court BRIBED stencils.

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Only 33 teams started that race. If you’ve got this stencil, don’t paint over it!

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BRIBED Stencil #4, which was made on thick posterboard, held up under the rigors of the BS Inspection better than any of its predecessors. I’d hoped that it would last through all 21 races of the 2010 24 Hours of LeMons season, so I kept taping and re-cutting it as the paint buildup caused it to break. Once the paint got close to a half-inch in thickness, however, the whole stencil just disintegrated at the 2010 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Buttonwillow. You can identify the era of your #4 by how blurry the design looks; late-2010 applications don’t have visible XXX symbols on the bottle. We stuck it back together as well as we could and hung it up in the LeMons Museum.

The original name for the Miami race was “24 Horas de Cuba del Norte,” and the event patch featured the image of Che Guevara with racing goggles. That was just fine until Glenn Beck found out about it and summoned angry Cuban-American protesters to PBIR, which resulted in angry phone calls to LeMons HQ from Florida and the eventual non-offensive name and patch change (strangely, nobody objected to LeMons “honoring” Rod Blagojevich in Illinois). All this silly controversy resulted in me modifying the BAKSHEESH! shirt design to give it a more Che-esque aspect.

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We got all psychedelic with the paint with BRIBED Stencil #6, no doubt due to the mind-altering influence of the thallium salts that were supposed to make our beards fall out.

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Bribed Stencil #6 isn’t quite as rare as #5, since the Miami race had more than twice the cars of the Cain’t Git Bayou event, and we brought it back for the 2011 season. Still, the BAKCHEESH! stencil, as seen on the cars of PBIR veterans, should be a coveted collector’s item in the future.

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Once the 2011 season started, the #6 BAKCHEESH! stencil was just too good to retire, so we used it exclusively for the first seven races. By the time of the Goin’ For Broken race at Reno-Fernley Raceway, however, the LeMons Supreme Court was getting a little bored with Judge Che. First, we made Bribed Stencil #7: this Nevada-centric stencil with tumblin’ dice.

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I’d planned to make a matching stencil celebrating another aspect of Nevada culture: a big mushroom cloud, in honor of the Nevada Test Site. However, Judge Rich (who races a mid-VW-engined Renault 4CV in LeMons when he’s not wearing the black robes of the LSC) broke out the box-cutter and created Bribed Stencil #8 instead. Both #7 and #8 went on to be used at many later races during the ’11 LeMons season, so examples should be plentiful.

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At the following race, the ‘Shine Country Classic at Carolina Motorsports Park in South Carolina, I felt that the region-specific Bribed stencils were a good idea, so I made Bribed Stencil #9 based on the South Carolina flag. Since this was a one-race stencil (i.e., we lost it between the ‘Shine Country Classic race and our return to CMP in the fall), it’s going to be a rare sight in the future.

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Bribed Stencil #5, from the 2010 Cain’t Git Bayou race in Louisiana, was the rarest of all Bribed Stencils . . . until the 2011 Cain’t Git Bayou race. It turns out that you have to be a special brand of crazy to race in Louisiana in sweltering-ass August, and so only 19 teams were serious enough to show up for this event. For them, I made #10, a New Orleans–themed stencil with the a fleur-de-lis and the French word for “bribed.” Suborné! If you’re one of the handful of teams with this stencil, don’t paint over it— it’s a badge of honor.

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I probably should have punished the Houston teams who refused to haul their cars the few hours over to the Cain’t Git Bayou by not making them a special regional stencil, but I relented and made #11. Since the star is in the wrong location for Dallas, #11 wasn’t suitable for use at the 2011-season-ending Heaps In the Heart of Texas race.